Often, data sectors on hard disk drives are split into two fragments. Currently, the two fragments are read by performing a full acquisition cycle over each of the two fragments. Performing a full acquisition cycle for the two fragments requires that each fragment includes a full-length preamble. The formatting associated with each full-length preamble consumes a significant portion of a hard disk drive's capacity. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method, system, and apparatus configured to reduce the required preamble length for one or more fragments of each split data sector.